Oracle has built a massive enterprise applications business over the decades: It bought PeopleSoft for $10 billion in 2004, Siebel Systems for nearly $6 billion the following year, and closed a $9.3 billion purchase of NetSuite a few months ago. Despite that, the company clearly still sees databases as Oracle’s bedrock, which is why it’s critical that, moving forward, those databases run on Oracle’s nascent cloud infrastructure.

And that’s just what’s going to happen, Oracle cofounder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison said on Wednesday, claiming the company’s new-and-improved infrastructure can run its databases better and faster than anyone else’s cloud infrastructure. Ellison’s remarks came on Oracle’s third quarter earnings call Wednesday night.

Generation two of Oracle’s infrastructure as service cloud now has the ability to run customers’ largest databases, something that is impossible to do using Amazon Web Services. Amazon can only run relatively small Oracle databases in their cloud. Gen 2 of Oracle IaaS also delivers ultra high database performance and form caller reliability in the cloud.

Ellison added that some of the company’s biggest customers are now negotiating “huge infrastructure as a service contracts” to move all of their Oracle databases to the Oracle cloud. And he said to expect some of those contracts to be announced within weeks.

Oracle certainly has competition for those deals given that Amazon Web Services (AWS), the largest provider of cloud infrastructure also runs Oracle databases. The claims and counterclaims between Ellison and AWS chief executive Andy Jassy have flown fast and furious over the past year.

Last year, Jassy said his company’s migration services and database option free big customers from “the shackles of hostile database vendors.” He did not name names, but the implication was clear. At the end of last year, Jassy also tweeted that Amazon had migrated 16,000 databases to AWS; that number was recently updated to 20,000. AWS did not specify which types of databases moved, but given that Oracle leads the market, some are assumed to be Oracle customers.

Fast forward to Wednesday’s call, in which Ellison said that many Oracle workloads run ten times faster on Oracle cloud than on AWS. He also claimed Oracle’s infrastructure is also cheaper than AWS for customers.

That’s the sort of statement that raises eyebrows: Oracle is known for charging a premium for both its database software and related maintenance and support. But given the need to stave off incursions from AWS, it could well be that the company will get more flexible both on pricing and support fees. Customers who may have no intention of moving to AWS can use that company’s migration service, and its variety of database options, as leverage to extract better deals from Oracle.

Ellison and Oracle co-chief executive Mark Hurd both said that this basic cloud infrastructure — which comprises the computers, storage, and networking needed to run database or application software — will be Oracle’s largest cloud business in the future. That will take some doing since, as Fortune’s Jonathan Vanian reported, this segment logged $178 million in sales and constituted just 2% of Oracle’s overall revenue in the third quarter.

For comparison purposes, AWS, which has been around for more than ten years, reported net sales of $3.56 billion for its most recent quarter.

DMG Entertainment, the Hollywood Studio that made Iron Man 3, is moving into virtual reality.

Dan Mintz, cofounder of the Beverly Hills, Calif.-based company, announced the launch of DMG VR, which is dedicated to entertainment that mixes storytelling with the new medium of VR.

Arcturus, the first incubated company under the DMG VR umbrella, will focus on developing interactive narrative experiences and next-gen technology across all VR platforms.

“The creative canvas of VR gives us new ways to experience stories and express creativity,” said Mintz, in a statement. “We’re partnering with a team of trailblazing leaders in this rapidly growing industry to push new boundaries and bring mind-blowing VR experiences to the world.”

The Arcturus team is led by key industry pioneers with decades of combined experience in the interactive and storytelling space. Ewan Johnson led production teams at Pixar and DreamWorks Animation, Devin Horsman is well-known in the industry as a leader in VR gaming, and Andy Stack was content and product pioneer for 360/VR Tech at YouTube/Google.

“We’re developing advanced technology to push storytelling in VR to new heights and combining it with original content, plus original content based on our world-class IP,” said Mintz. “When you add the Arcturus team to the mix, it sets a bold new standard for immersive VR experiences.”

According to Mintz, DMG VR will target funding, acquiring, and partnering with top entities in the high-growth space, particularly those with the acumen to succeed in the U.S. and globally.

“DMG’s track record of global success, considerable resources, and Dan’s creative vision will be instrumental as we elevate interactive VR experiences far beyond what is possible today, both technically and creatively,” said Andy Stack, chief operations officer at Arcturus. “We’re excited to join DMG and open the door to the future of the VR experience.”

(Reuters) – A U.S. judge gave final approval on Thursday to a settlement agreement in a class-action lawsuit against Lyft, ending a legal case that challenged the independent contractor status of the ride-hailing service’s drivers.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco gave his final approval to the $27 million settlement, after granting preliminary approval in June, according to court filings.

The judge had previously rejected a $12.25 million settlement offer because it “short-changed” drivers.

Lyft drivers in California had sued the company, arguing they should be classified as employees and therefore be entitled to reimbursement for expenses, including gasoline and vehicle maintenance. Drivers pay those costs themselves.

The settlement agreement keeps drivers as independent contractors.

In his order, Chhabria cautioned, “The agreement is not perfect. And the status of Lyft drivers under California law remains uncertain going forward.”

Uber faces a similar class-action lawsuit from drivers in California and Massachusetts. A settlement offer in that case valued at up to $100 million was rejected last year by a judge who deemed it inadequate for drivers.

Lyft has more than 700,000 drivers nationally and Uber has more than 1.5 million globally. The profits and valuations of these companies would be severely affected if they had to reclassify drivers as employees.

Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who represents the Lyft drivers, said on Thursday she was “very pleased to be at the end of this process.” The lawsuit was filed in 2013.

A Lyft spokeswoman said the settlement agreement “will preserve the flexibility of drivers to choose when, where and for how long they drive with Lyft.”

The company has said that driver surveys show that more than 80 percent of Lyft drivers prefer being independent contractors because of the flexibility that status allows.

The settlement provides thousands of dollars to Lyft drivers who logged the most miles, although infrequent drivers will see a nominal amount of cash. As part of the agreement, drivers also get benefits such as more protections from getting kicked off the app.

“The question of whether the drivers are appropriately classified as employees or independent contractors will just have to wait for another day,” Liss-Riordan said.

Apple’s prospects for the iPhone look dim in China, with declining market share and competition from more advanced products. That is one reason Apple is now focusing on the second-largest smartphone market in the world: India.

“I sort of view India as where China was seven to 10 years ago from that point of view,” Apple chief executive Tim Cook said during an investor call last year. “I think there’s a really great opportunity there.”

Apple plans to begin manufacturing smartphones in India, starting with the smaller and cheaper iPhone SE, according to India’s Economic Times. It is also marketing a discontinued version of the iPhone 6 through online retailers for a discounted price of $450 — because its products can’t command the same premium prices there, CNET reports. This comes after Apple repeatedly failed to get permission from the Indian government to import refurbished phones because of concerns it would use India as a dumping ground for old technologies.

Apple is repeating the mistakes it made in China. It is relying on its brand recognition to build a market and failing to understand the needs of its customers. By marketing inferior products, it may also be insulting Indian consumers.

Smartphones with capabilities similar to iPhones sell in India for a fraction of the iPhones’ cost, and Apple enjoys practically no brand recognition among the hundreds of millions of Indians who are buying their first devices. It also does not have any form of product lock-in as it does with western consumers who have owned other Apple products and are now buying smartphones.

What’s more, Apple has not customized its phones or apps to the needs of Indian consumers; they are the same as in the United States. Try asking Siri to recognize an Indian name or city; it is clueless. Try asking it to play a Bollywood tune, as I have, and you’ll also be banging your head against the wall. And forget having support for Indian languages: Everything is in English.

Apple does offer an Indian version of its music-streaming service, but it is expensive and largely inferior to those of local competitors such as Saavn, Gaana, and Hungama. It also has the same problem as the Apple India App Store: It requires credit cards, which less than 1 percent of the population have.

This is no way to conquer a market.

Well-to-do Indian consumers who can afford iPhones want the latest and greatest, not hand-me-downs. They aren’t buying iPhones because they are technically superior; they are buying them for social gratification.

And Apple doesn’t even come close on price. Take the Lyf phones that telecom giant Reliance Industries is marketing. The lower-end Lyf smartphones sell for $45 and come with three months of unlimited data, text and calls. Higher-end models cost about $150 and have features comparable to the iPhone 7, which sells for $750 and higher.

Until recently, Samsung and India’s Micromax dominated the Indian market. But Chinese brands — such as Vivo, Xiaomi, Lenovo, and Oppo — are making major inroads, now enjoying 46 percent market share, according to Counterpoint Research. These companies offer stunning OLED displays (which Apple does not yet offer), state-of-the-art processors, and features that are popular in Asian markets, such as dual SIM capabilities and selfie cameras. The phones are also available in different Indian languages. They use Google’s Android operating system, which enables them to have the Google Assistant converse in the Indian languages, including Hindi, that the assistant is learning.

It is also notable that Android has 97 percent market share in India. This means that there is little motivation for Indian developers to write software for the Apple platform and it will always be a laggard for hot new apps.

Apple typically sells its products online or through its very high-end retail stores. FactorDaily says the company is planning to open three Apple stores in India this year. But this is not the way to reach hundreds of millions of people in villages and small towns. Chinese vendor Oppo, for example, achieved great success by selling through 35,000 electronics retailers and setting up 180 service centers, according to Bloomberg.

If Apple is serious about entering India, it needs to do more than assemble components and open stores there. It must develop new products and services that suit the Indian market, and it should buy local competitors, such as Saavn and Gaana. With 500 million more people about to be connected to the Internet via smartphones, the opportunities are endless.

VentureBeat’s Bots Channel tracks the most important news and analysis from the exploding field of bots and messaging. Each week, we select the top stories and present them in our free weekly newsletter, BotBeat. We include news stories by VentureBeat staff, guest articles from leading figures in the bots community, and a good number of posts from a wide variety of other outlets. You can subscribe to our BotBeat newsletter to receive this information in your inbox every Thursday.

Here’s this week’s newsletter:

The enterprise chat wars are exploding. Last week, Google launched a beta version of Hangouts Chat and just two days ago, Microsoft released Teams in 181 countries and 19 languages. The moves by these 800 pound gorillas imperil companies like Slack, Yammer, and Hipchat — the very companies that pioneered the enterprise chat space.

Yet the giants are taking different approaches. With its 85 million Office 365 users, Microsoft has aready-made market to sell its service. Companies wanting the chat and group collaboration functionality are going to have to pay. Google, as Ken Yeung writes, is taking a page from Slack’s playbook by “establishing a platform to not only be a place to hold discussions, but to quickly jump into video calling when needed.” Hangouts Chat is marketed as a free service, available as part of companies’ G-suite subscriptions. So, a different approach to the same goal of charging businesses.

Google and Microsoft are not alone in their enterprise focus. For instance, Facebook offers Workplace and Cisco has Spark. These big tech companies are now pushing enterprise chat and group collaboration, with bots as a service. Sure it’s an old war for enterprise market share, but now group chat has been weaponized to be integrated into an operating system and a host of applications. If that’s what determines victory, then perhaps first movers like Slack never had achance.

From the Bots Channel

If you have a tough time managing your personal finances, you might be interested in Penny, an app that examines behavior around your bank accounts and credit cards to alert you of any issues, such as data breaches. The company looks to rival Mint.com in terms of functionality, but is going after the average person […]

Microsoft today announced Microsoft Teams — with Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, and web apps — has hit general availability in 181 countries and 19 languages. The company’s answer to Slack is part of Office 365, meaning Microsoft Teams is for businesses only — there are no plans for afree or consumer version. Microsoft Teams […]

Artificial intelligence is having its breakout moment. Once confined to the realm of science fiction, it seems bright-eyed entrepreneurs everywhere are now getting into AI. As renowned author, editor, and futurist Kevin Kelly puts it, “The business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI.” But while disruptive […]

Amazon’s voice-controlled Echo Dot was a popular gift over the holidays. If you have one, you know it can make your life easier in any number of ways, letting you do everything from playing a song to turning off the kitchen lights using only your voice. While most people know that the Echo Dot does […]

Watson captured the public imagination about artificial intelligence after defeating two world champions of Jeopardy in 2011 and bringing home a$1 million prize. Since then, Watson has gained new cognitive capabilities through APIs like Alchemy (for sentiment analysis), Tone Analyzer (for personality and emotional analysis), and Conversation (a chatbot builder) and has been embedded […]

Slack’s problem just got a lot worse. Not only did the full-page New York Times ad fail to stop the upcoming launch of Microsoft Teams next week on March 14, but now Google is entering the fray with Hangouts Chat in private beta. For the millions of G Suite and Office 365 users, Slack will […]

Beyond VB

In the year 2000, logging onto the Internet usually meant sitting down at a monitor connected to a dial-up modem, a bunch of beeps and clicks, and a “You’ve got mail!” notification. In those days, AOL Instant Messenger was the Internet’s favorite pastime, and the king of AIM was SmarterChild, a chatbot that lived in your buddy list. (via NPR)

According to a recent study by technology company Retale, 58% of the 500 Millennials surveyed have used chatbots. Of the 42% of respondents who had not used them, 53% were interested in using them, 26% had no interest in using them, and 20% were neutral. (via Social Media Examiner)

Chatbots are new and hot but how do you get them to make money for your company? Is it really possible to leverage chatbots to generate sales? More importantly, have you created a chatbot but are struggling to monetize it? (via Entrepreneur)

A strange thing happens when Capital One sends out automated fraud alerts via SMS. A significant number of customers seem to believe the sender is human, and begin responding with natural language. (via Fast Company)

And the Tel Aviv event will move to Kyiv, Ukraine, in October. Then the rotating will start again. The Casual Connect USA event will be in Anaheim, Calif., (at Disneyland) from January 16 to January 18 in 2018.

Casual Connect Europe will be in London from May 29 to May 31, 2018. And Casual Connect Tel Aviv will take place in September, 2018, and another Casual Connect Asia event will take place in Hong Kong in 2018.

Tams noted that while Casual Connect events would be rotating, its commitment to moving the games industry forward and providing developers, publishers, and others with indispensable insights would remain the same.

Microsoft today started rolling out a new Windows 10 preview build for people participating in the fast ring of the Windows Insider Program. Build 15060 arrives just two days after Microsoft released build 15058.

This is the fourth consecutive preview build with no big new features — only bug fixes. And there are, naturally, known issues here. Microsoft has been getting ready to roll out the Windows 10 Creators Update, and many of its features, like Game Mode and Paint 3D, have already become available to Insiders.

With the release of this build, if you’ve pinned the Settings icon to the start menu, the icon won’t be greyed out after you click on it for the first time, Dona Sarkar, a software engineer in Microsoft’s Windows and Devices Group, wrote in a blog post. And third-party input method editors (IMEs) will now show up in Settings after they have been installed, Sarkar wrote.

A few Edge bugs have been squashed, too. No longer will you get an error message if you’re using the Microsoft Pinyin IME and you type in letters and then delete them in a search box on a website in Edge. Edge won’t “fail to launch again for a few minutes because previous instances were still suspended in the background” after the browser crashes, Sarkar wrote. And Microsoft has ironed out iframe issues affecting F12 Developer Tools in Edge.

When you press the tab key in a text box inside a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app, you won’t be prevented from typing further anymore because taskhost.exe will no longer crash when you do that, Sarkar wrote.

And if you have a Surface Pro 3 or a Surface 3, as long as you have the latest drivers you should be able to update your system even if an SD card is plugged in.

On to the issues:

You won’t be able to install language packs in this build.

Windows might not remind you to restart after you install an update, like a Surface firmware update. If that does happen, visit Settings > Update & security > Windows Update to check if you need to restart your PC.

Once again, certain apps and games might crash in this build because of an issue pertaining to advertising ID — this might happen if you’ve created a user account while using Windows 10 build 15031. In that case, Sarkar recommends deleting this registry key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\AdvertisingInfo

Once again, while you’re broadcasting a game, the broadcast live review window in the Game Bar might flash green; this only affects you and doesn’t have any impact on the broadcast itself.

And there are issues that could come up as you try to install this update. If it doesn’t get installed and you get an error message with the code 8024a112, restart your PC. “If your PC appears to hang during the reboot, power your PC off and back on and the install will proceed,” Sarkar wrote.

You might also get this error in Windows Update: “Some updates were cancelled. We’ll keep trying in case new updates become available.” In that case, delete this registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Auto Update\RequestedAppCategories\8b24b027-1dee-babb-9a95-3517dfb9c552

Plus, today’s release isn’t available yet for people in Brazil and Poland, nor is the 32-bit version of Windows 10 Home available, Sarkar wrote.

If you want to try this new build for PC or mobile but you’re not a Windows Insider, you can sign up here.

The sheer scale of SXSW can be overwhelming for those looking for guidance on the next big thing. I went to Austin with one mission in mind: to zero in on conversational interfaces.

2017 has huge potential for widespread adoption of conversational interfaces. It follows promising work by early adopters such as Activision, Burberry, and H&M, which proved the early promise of the humble chatbot.

Meanwhile, voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant are shaping the connected home, providing us with fluid, intuitive access to services and products.

But there’s more still to come as the field develops. I believe every business should equip itself with a chat strategy to guide how its audience speaks and engages with it.

It sounds like a daunting prospect, but this year SXSW was chock-full of expert advice and debate to help guide that process.

Face value

With a panel including the FBI, biometric experts Kairos, and privacy activist Cory Doctorow, it was an arresting debate. Its core subject — procuring and securing personal data — is also fundamental to the future success of conversational interfaces.

Its early slot in the SXSW programme shows the importance of these issues. While conversational interfaces are picking up momentum for good reason, it’s vital that the systems behind them are robust enough to provide security while also delivering a smooth user experience.

The rightful victims of this shift are passwords and PINs – who wants to shout out their bank details to complete an online order using voice? In their place, facial recognition, fingerprinting, and iris scanning are becoming useful tools to verify who you are rather than simply what you know.

New tech, new blood

You know SXSW is a melting pot, but new challenges of the conversational interface are bringing diverse talent to the wider tech industry, too.

Comedians, directors, poets, and others from artistic disciplines are now finding new roles: creating voices for businesses.

The transition makes sense when you consider that these professions trade on human understanding and empathy. Those are two qualities that successful conversational interfaces will depend on.

While “brand voice” will be a familiar consideration for many marketers, chatbots and voice assistants change the dynamic completely. How do you handle off-topic conversations, complex questions, or complaints — sometimes all at the same time?

Creating the right experience across these variables will entail more than “seeming human.”

Conveying empathy and instilling confidence — maybe a little well-judged humor, too — could make or break the user experience.

John Maeda (Head of computational design and inclusion at Automatic) advocated for this crossover when he presented the third annual Design In Tech report on Saturday. He called on designers to “love their copywriters and content strategists” in order to take full advantage of language as an interface.

Emotional design for the many

In a Friday session on Designing emotionally intelligent machines, Sophie Kleber (‎Executive Director of product and innovation at Huge) projected the market for emotional recognition software will hit $36.7 billion by 2021. That’s incredible growth for a field that many aren’t even aware of yet — a field exploring the role of face and voice recognition in forging emotional connections

But while this tech will help establish emotional cues from a user, how do we then determine how a system should respond?

Kleber proposed a framework to address this question, comprising two axes. One is a customer’s need for emotional connection; the other is a brand’s permission to fulfil it. When neither exist, the system should tune out. When the former is high but the latter is low, the system should behave like a machine. The system should, therefore, only react like a human when there is permission to do so.

To turn that framework into reality, designers and writers will need to become familiar with psychology, Kleber said. Deep understanding of emotional processes and responses will be crucial to devising the right system responses.

I’d add an extra requirement for tomorrow’s designers to create appropriate responses: be the target audience.

It sounds facile, but Maeda had a similar message in his report. He reinforced the point that diverse backgrounds are “inseparable” from successful design.

If future tech is going to benefit the many, it must cater to the full spectrum of their needs. That can’t happen without a representative design cohort behind the curtain.

The gaming industry generated $724 million in revenues in the United States last month, according to data-tracking firm The NPD Group. That’s down 21 percent year-over-year from $918.7 million. All segments — hardware, console and PC software, and accessories — were down compared to the same period in 2016.

But it’s revenues from console hardware that is falling the hardest.

February 2017 results

NPD tracks data from physical retailers and digital sales from certain online stores and publishers in the U.S. You will get data from third-parties on the Xbox Game Store or the PlayStation store, but there’s nothing from Blizzard’s Battle.net. So the following NPD data is only a snapshot of a larger and more dynamic market.

Hardware: $204 million (down 30 percent from $292.2 million in February 2016)

Console software: $344.2 million (down 14 percent from $402 million)

PC software: $25 million (down 26 percent from $33.6 million)

Accessories: $150.8 million (down 21 percent from $191 million)

“Total hardware spending in February declined 30 percent versus February 2016 to $204 million,” NPD analyst Mat Piscatella said in a statement. “Console hardware accounted for 82 percent of the total declines as both average retail pricing and units sold fell versus year ago.”

But software didn’t do much better in large part because For Honor, Nioh, and Halo Wars 2 were the only major releases. Let’s get to the full software chart.

Software

For Honor

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

Grand Theft Auto V

NBA 2K17

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege

Madden NFL 17

Battlefield 1

Nioh*

Overwatch**

*No digital sales*No Battle.net digital sales

This list includes physical sales at U.S. retailers and digital sales through certain platforms like Steam and the Xbox or PlayStation downloadable game stores. It does not, however, include microtransactions or downloadable-content add-ons.

“Ubisoft’s For Honor was the best-selling game of February 2017 despite having only 12 days in market during the month,” said Piscatella. “And two new releases debut in the month’s Top 10: Ubisoft’s For Honor and the PS4 exclusive Nioh, developed by Team Ninja.”

Halo Wars 2 did not make it into the top 10 overall. It was No. 6 best-selling game on the Xbox One in February, but that does not include any digital sales because Microsoft does not report that data to the NPD.

Beyond the new releases, however, games like Rainbow Six: Siege and Overwatch continue to land on the list alongside perennial favorites like Grand Theft Auto V, NBA 2K17, Call of Duty, and Madden. Siege’s surge comes likely as a result of its growing competitive scene and its popularity on streaming sites like Twitch.

Here’s a look at the top 10 best-selling games by platform:

Xbox One

For Honor

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare

Grand Theft Auto V

NBA 2K17

Halo Wars 2*

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege

Battlefield 1

Madden NFL 17

Overwatch**

PlayStation 4

For Honor

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

Grand Theft Auto V

Nioh*

NBA 2K17

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare

Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue

Battlefield 1

Madden NFL 17

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege

Wii U

Super Smash Bros.

Paper Mario: Color Splash

Minecraft

Yoshi’s Wooly World

Super Mario Maker

Pokken Tournament

New Super Mario Bros. U + New Super Luigi U

Splatoon

Super Mario 3D World

Mario Kart 8

Portables

Poochy and Yoshi’s Wooly World

Pokémon Sun

Pokémon Moon

Super Mario Maker

Super Smash Bros.

Mario Kart 7

Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King

Pokémon Omega Ruby

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D

Mario Party: Star Rush

Hardware

PlayStation 4 was the top-selling system, but console sales continue to fall as Microsoft and Sony have saturated much of their potential market. It’s likely that some consumers are saving their hardware dollars for the Nintendo Switch that launched in March.

“The PlayStation 4 was the top-selling hardware system in the month,” said Piscatella. “And for the fifth month running, the PlayStation 4 Slim System 500GB Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End Bundle was the month’s top selling console.”

Finally, Nintendo’s dedicated handheld saw a month-over-month bump thanks to the introduction of pair of new New 3DSes, which is how you have to write that term.

“In the portable space, 3DS unit sales were up 77 percent versus January 2017 driven by the 3DS New Galaxy Style model and the 3DS Limited Pikachu Yellow model,” said Piscatella.

Next month, we’ll get a look at how the Switch shakes all of this up and how it stacks up to other console launches.

For families living in large cities, finding great activities for children can be problematic. Some places are better than others, but do you really want to make a long-term commitment when there are many others to see? Plus, you may want your children to enjoy a diverse mix of classes. To help parents navigate the options, Kidpass is a service focused around activity providers for kids that mirrors what ClassPass does for fitness.

The subscription service for kids’ classes had previously raised $1.2 million to fulfil its mission, but it’s now adding to that total, thanks to investments from Y Combinator and Gymboree founder Joan Barnes.

Targeting a $30 billion-plus industry, KidPass gives parents a choice of more than 50,000 activities their children can participate in — from music classes for babies to kids’ yoga, swimming lessons, soccer, arts and crafts, cooking classes, puppet shows, museum programs, even building a robot, making chocolate pizza, or Star Wars-themed light saber fencing. KidsPass said it has activities for kids ages 2 months to over 12 years.

Company cofounder Solomon Liou explained that KidPass was created when he and his partners became parents and felt like “the process of finding great activities for our little ones was both frustrating and time-consuming. In fact, we often spent more time searching for and scheduling activities than we did at the class itself!” It can be difficult to find things to entertain children — especially with busy schedules — so KidPass wants to do the footwork for you.

Since its debut 15 months ago, Liou said the company has been growing between 20 and 30 percent monthly, with more than 50,000 bookings processed through its platform, of which 10,000 alone were made last month. He also noted that KidPass achieved a $1 million annual run rate in 11 months and $2 million in just four months.

There are three plans available, starting at $49 per month and going up to $99 and $189. The difference is in how many credits you receive, how many days they can roll over, and how many children can use them. KidPass’ highest plan also comes with a concierge service. There are no contracts.

Parents can search for activities by age, category, and location, or look through curated tips made by the KidPass team. Once you settle on an activity and select the date and time, you’re all set. The idea is to make the activities more affordable than they would be if you went directly through the provider. Liou explained that businesses will provide discounts to KidPass members as an incentive because they “want the exposure to new families.”

The service is currently only available in New York City, but Liou said that there are plans to expand nationally later this year. The company plans to raise additional funds to spur that effort shortly. Possible new markets include Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.